CHAPTER XXX.
THE MOTHER'S BLESSING.
It was six o'clock in the afternoon, broad day, when Catherine arrived home.
Had Isidore been alive and she were coming to visit her mother in health, she would have got down from the stage at the end of the village and slipped round upon her father's farm, without going through. But a widow and a mother, she did not give a thought to rustic jests; she alighted without fear; it seemed to her that scorn and insult ought to be warded off from her by her child and her sorrow, the dark and the bright angel.
At the first she was not recognized; she was so pale and so changed that she did not seem the same woman; and what set her apart from her class was the lofty air which she had already caught from community with an elegant man.
One person knew her again but not till she had passed by.
This was Pitou's aunt Angelique. She was gossiping at the townhouse door with some cronies about the oath required of the clergy, declaring that she had heard Father Fortier say that he would never vow allegiance to the Revolution, preferring to submit to martyrdom than bend his head to the democratic yoke.
"Bless us and save us!" she broke forth, in the midst of her speech, "if here ain't Billet's daughter and her fondling a-stepping down off the coach."
"Catherine?" cried several voices.